Finally, Finally
by ForASecondThereWe'dWon
Summary: Growing back together can take years, but sometimes, that most important shift happens from one moment to the next. This story is my love letter to Katniss and Peeta. Rated M for a physical expression of love that is (finally, finally) mutual.


It was funny how, without their town around them, it felt like the entirety of civilization had gone. There were the noises they made, talking or not talking, and when they were silent, there was the whisper of the tall grass growing through the fence, caring nothing for rules or borders. At night, they blew out the candles and the sky was so black, neither of them could fathom why someone would want to put a dome between it and the earth. What was a stolen blue on high-tech panels compared to this magnificent natural star-scape?

Haymitch would drink too much (by evening, they were past trying to stop him) and stumble home to darken his own door. Alone, Katniss and Peeta were often overwhelmed by the sense of freedom that seemed to have been lurking in the corners throughout the day, closing in on them by dusk, and pouncing when the first star appeared to give the signal. They would race from the house, Peeta's or Katniss's, running through the streets like children―children who had learned to run from things now best left to memory.

The bodies of the thousands who hadn't escaped the fire bombs had been removed from the streets and buried. Katniss and Peeta had stayed inside on the day the crew came to do it. Peeta especially dreaded it, didn't want to see something that would suggest a corpse was one of his family. The grave was outside of town, but they never went there. Aside from what was judged a basic act of decency (burying the victims of a war they hadn't known they were soldiers of), nothing else had been done to clean up District 12, let alone revive it. No one would be coming back to live there and the government of the new, ramshackle Panem couldn't spare the resources and manpower for a town with a population of three.

Essentially, they were alone.

Sometimes, they screamed while they ran in the old neighbourhoods. Crying used to be allow too, until they'd started falling and cutting themselves on rubble and Katniss got worried one of them would receive an injury she couldn't fix. Warped, wet vision was fine. To be temporarily blinded by the force and quantity of the tears was alright. They just couldn't cry and run. The sky they knew now was too black for eyes that weren't clear.

Tonight, Katniss wished it would snow. District 12 already felt so much like winter. Quiet, if they stepped lightly (as Peeta was still learning to). Cold, if they didn't hold each other close (which they did, almost all the time). Peaceful, if they numbed their minds to the past (the most difficult skill they'd ever had to learn). But she still wanted the snow.

Peeta was beside her, then suddenly behind her, wiggling his fingers deep into her thick, dark hair. It was something he'd taken to doing. He'd dig into her hair, or cup her round cheekbones, or look into her eyes for as long as she'd let him and say: "Katniss, there's so much of you." He had a gift for perpetual amazement, but Katniss thought maybe this was how he'd always been, with her. It was near midnight and they were the only two in the street, but in Peeta's eyes, before any of the rest of what had happened, maybe it had always just been the two of them. She was the opposite, always seeing everything all of the time, but she hadn't seen him. Not really.

Her hair was clean and she liked the way his nails scraped and his fingertips rubbed. When he stepped close to her, Katniss pulled a bunch of her hair over her shoulder to hang along her collarbone and Peeta's hand came with it. He relaxed his grip, smoothing his palm across the top of her chest. Katniss caught his hand under her own and breathed deeply. She hated to close her eyes. She looked up at the sky instead, but it was hard to tell the difference between it and the inside of her eyelids. Peeta didn't try to remove his hand. He allowed her so much control. Katniss didn't want it all, but in some ways it was better to take what Peeta offered. When she made the choices, he knew it was real.

She reached back, wordlessly requesting Peeta place his other hand in hers. Katniss felt the clump of hair he'd had his fingers in trickle down her back as their palms met. Sometimes, they held hands loosely, like links in a chain that might break apart, or like two seeds, tangling in each other when they caught the same breeze. Like dandelion seeds. Peeta's palm was so warm it made Katniss feel more than companionship. They stroked back and forth and she was amazed that hands hardened by labour and the lives of lost loved ones slipping through them could leave skin sensitive enough to experience a tingle when they touched like this. She didn't need to ask Peeta if he felt it. He probably felt it all the time.

Katniss turned and a little breeze snuck between the buildings to blow her hair into her face, like a mischievous child. Her eyes were just adjusted enough to tell her that Peeta was smiling at her, sweeping her hair back one strand at a time. If she gave him the time, Katniss was certain that Peeta would be able to arrange her hair as artfully as he had once swirled icing on the surfaces of cakes. The darkness made her vision dreamlike. For a moment, she floated in a void of memory. Prim was the one tucking her hair into place. Peeta's careful fingers were wielding the slick tooth of a Capitol-selected blade. Katniss lost her balance, but Peeta caught her under her elbows.

"I'm sorry. Is it the memories?"

"Please," Katniss said, holding out her hand to him. No one came to coach her in rhetoric and elocution anymore.

Peeta took it, always ready to be what she wanted him to be. Who she wanted him to be for her. For a while, he'd been a boy with no identity, Snow's weapon sent into the heart of the rebellion. Into her heart, never mind the rest of them. Now, he was a little bit like her. He mirrored her, he trusted her to remember the whole world to him. He was her shadow, silently following. He was her crutch, holding her up at night when she couldn't stop screaming. He was her morphling, dulling that pain. Without her father, Peeta was her patience. Without her mother, Peeta was the one she came home to. Without Prim, Peeta was the immaterial feeling of family she carried under her skin. Without Gale, Peeta was the one she loved. The one she _could_ love, finally and truly.

Katniss dropped Peeta's hand and before he could take another step, she crowded against him, finding his mouth with hers.

"It's alright now." Peeta stroked her back firmly, having learned it was ok to push a little to get in past the nightmares. He was misunderstanding. She'd let him love her with little in return for such a long time.

Katniss tried again, pressing her lips against his and working them softly so that he would respond. Peeta was holding her stiffly, as though he would step into the pattern of a formal Capitol dance. Hesitatingly, his lips parted like one of the flowers he tended with sweat and devotion. In the black non-street of the black non-District, on a night as black as the coal so many they knew had lived and died for, he opened just a little to her, and Katniss saw the stars fall to earth. No wonder, without the cameras, he kept his kisses from her: so close behind them was his heart.

Katniss gave a shuddering nudge with her chin, shifting the weight of the kiss onto him. Let him have her now, if he loved her still.

Somewhere, through the layers Peeta had developed, within the rooms he walked in his own mind where he told himself he was content, he had waited for this. He took her face between his hands and shared with her the kiss he'd always wanted them to have. Peeta's lips were slow and flexing and the baby-soft ends of his hair swept Katniss's temple. His fingers traced the backs of her ears and the underside of her jaw and she pressed the length of her body against his, her heart in her throat, heavy and ripe.

He grew hungry, clamping a tensely muscled arm around her lower back, gripping the curve of her hip. Katniss took short, sharp breaths when Peeta's mouth broke away from hers, his lips dragging down her neck. The touch of his tongue to the base of her throat had her arousal surging up until she felt a voracity of her own. She wrapped her arms up under his and squeezed around his back, wringing the passion from them like water. Peeta's hand dropped to clench her ass, scooping his hips into hers as though his want could hollow her out. Not possible. Katniss had never felt more full and alive.

"I―" he breathed down the front of her shirt, his forehead lolling on her shoulder.

"Yes," Katniss rushed out, freeing one arm to drag her fingers up the back of his neck and into his hair.

They eased their bodies apart; their limbs had begun to lock, either from the intensity of the embrace or the subtle tilt of the season towards winter. They could see the way the world changed again, no longer living just day to day. Their eyes met, flickering like the suits of flame they'd once worn. Then Peeta tugged her hand, apologizing when Katniss tripped, not prepared for his rush of adrenaline, but she was laughing and finding her footing the following instant.

They chased the near-future back through the streets to the gates of the place where they were king and queen. Where they were orphans. They pushed into Peeta's house together, two wild things coming in with the night, shoulder to shoulder over the threshold. Though stairs had been one of the lesser obstacles Peeta had had to contend with after the prosthetic took the place of his leg, he maintained a bedroom on the ground floor. Katniss knew where it was and could have seen her way to it if her eyes hadn't been closed, Peeta's hand in the space between her shoulder blades and his mouth back on hers.

They made it to the bedroom, the bed inside a familiar friend that had been rarely slept in alone. Neither Peeta's bed nor Katniss's felt like it belonged just to one of them. They'd shared these rooms before they'd shared the thoughts and memories that hurt them most. Now everything belonged to them both and they were each other's. Katniss felt her way down backwards, Peeta's body hot and primed on top of hers, protecting her and wanting her. Staying with her every second.

His hands ran and danced on her hips, slipping her shirt up higher and higher. Katniss flung her arms over her head and Peeta plucked the shirt from her, kissing across the top of her breasts, shaping his tongue to her nipples. Katniss grabbed at him, but Peeta sat back, unbuttoning his shirt and jerking it from one shoulder, then the other. She reached for the front of his pants, hooking her fingers inside to draw him back down to her. Peeta's hand tunneled and twisted between them and then Katniss felt the smooth heat of his erection, laid down on her abdomen as though in surrender. He shifted and yanked, Peeta's heart rushing along with his hands as he divested himself; his chest pounded like a drum against hers. It reminded her that he could also be rough. A striver. A fighter. A Victor.

Katniss undid her own pants and Peeta's warm hands darted over to take charge of shimmying them down the bow of her hips, sliding them from her unresisting legs in the motion of removing loaves from an oven. She stared up at him. Peeta was golden in the warm light that filtered in from another room, a room where he might have had these thoughts before. He breathed deeply and his exhale traveled over her skin like wind. His hands were all over her, smoothing her breasts and the inlet of her waist, while his lips remained with hers. Touching, pulling, always.

Katniss became restless, her fingers outlining the muscles in his chest and lower. She parted her hips wide on instinct and Peeta dropped into them, his press a slow stamp that left her marked, though not visibly. Her desire climbed and Peeta sought its fount, gliding weathered fingers between her legs and striking up into her so that she cried out. He kept an insistent pressure on her clit, urging Katniss to struggle against him, then with him as he stroked two fingers up inside her, digging in and finding his place there.

He pulled his fingers from her and Katniss clutched his hips between her bent knees in anticipation. Peeta entered her, shivering, and she held the sweating back of his neck, rubbing her cheek against his when kissing her was too much and his mouth fell away. He began to love her slowly and deeply, the smell of her sweat―hot, damp, and female―consuming him. Katniss could see he was letting her love in, allowing it to seep through his skin, crawl through his veins, and pour into the small, secret spaces of his chest, both breaking his heart and strengthening it. Finally. _Finally_.

Peeta's tenderness was exquisite and complete and Katniss trembled in his embrace. Her hips started to twitch, then rock, then bang against his when she felt the fire that he had stoked rising inside her. He dove deeper with her, his arms encircling her while he panted his emotions hotly into her ear and bumped the bed against the wall in a steady rhythm. The peaks of pleasure lifted her higher. Peeta tangled his tongue loosely with hers, persuading her, convincing her of what she already knew.

She felt a ripple, then a pulsing, needy squeeze, teetering on orgasm's jagged edge. Peeta's face hovered over hers and Katniss honed in on his kind eyes, the goodness there that he'd never made her earn. His square jaw tightened as he struggled not to let go too soon, not to leave her behind. Katniss's back arched, her breasts molding into the planes of his chest, as she clawed a hand up his back.

"It feels..." Peeta panted.

"What? What?" Katniss's voice was breathy and scattered.

He groped for the side of her face, cupping her cheek in his palm.

"Real."

Peeta's head dropped as Katniss's lifted, their foreheads touching as they spoke each other's names, Katniss's a groan in his mouth, Peeta's a tremulous cry in hers. They clung together as the feeling moved through them, holding on until they could remember whose arms and legs were whose. Peeta shuffled off of Katniss without letting her go and she was pulled onto her side, still caught up in him.

"Stay with me," he whispered, so that Katniss could just hear him over the pounding of her heart.

"Always," she replied, tears rolling over the bridge of her nose and her smile disappearing into Peeta's as he kissed her again.


End file.
